Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Joyce as the master

There’s an anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that
I really love:

“… one day he dined with Vanderpyl and another writer, Edmond
Jaloux, at a restaurant in the rue St. Honore. As they drank champagne and
Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert's Trois Contes, began to praise the faultlessness of its
style and language. Joyce, in spite of his own admiration for Flaubert,
bristled, 'Pas
si bien que ga. II commence avec une faute.' And taking the book he showed them
that in the first sentence of'Un Cceur simple,' 'Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de
Pont-l'Eveque envierent d Mme Aubain sa servante Felicite,' envierent should be enviaient, since the action is continued rather
than completed. Then he thumbed through the book, evidently with a number of
mistakes in mind, and came to the last sentence of the final story, 'Herodias,'
'Comme elle
etait tres lourde, Us la portaient altemativement.' 'Altemativement is wrong,' he announced, 'since there

are three bearers.”

Oh that
High modernism! So elegant, so intelligent.
What Joyce does to Flaubert here is what Flaubert, in his letters, did
to Balzac – he trumps the master.

The
implication is that a literary text is something made with precision. It is
like a ship, where every plank must be tongue-and-grooved closely with every
other plank to resist the elements.

Yet put
this way, it seems wrong. Shouldn’t the novel seek, instead, to be penetrated
by the elements? Or at least to reflect them – as per Stendhal’s image of the
mirror walking down the road. Isn’t the mistake in Herodias, in fact, related
to the fact that the description – the mirroring – involves three bearers?

Of
course, Stendhal’s mirror shows up in Ulysses
as the cracked looking glass of a serving girl. The crack is not simply a
matter of distortion, but a reminder that the mirror’s smooth surface doesn’t
really model what is happening in writing. Writing has parts and dimensions –
words and sentences and paragrahs and chapters, among the parts, and
denotation, sound, connotation and
history, among the dimensions. I look at the page and see a smooth surface that
I recognize as the printed page, but when I read, when I am initiated into what
is going on, the surface breaks up. Joyce, that Jesuit, saw the old Latin alter in
alternativement. It was the kind of
second hearing that Flaubert had, too.

Still:
the ship metaphor that I used seems not to capture what is going on here,
although it does suggest that the text resists – it resists first. It doesn’t
show, although part of it is certainly evoking images.

But I
don’t want to discard the ship image just yet, because it leads me to one of my
favorite passages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Here, too, the story becomes an image for a
view of language and its effects:

“Le
vaisseau Argo ~The shipArgo

A frequent image: that of
the shipArgo(luminous
and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended
with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its

name or its form. This shipArgois highly
useful: it affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not
by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions (which
cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation):substitu-

tion(one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) andnomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability
of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing
is left of the origin: Argois an object with no other cause than its name,
with no other identity than its form.”

I think Joyce would have been intrigued by this passage, but I don’t
think he would have quite agreed with it. And yet, couldn’t one say that the
infinite circularity of Finnegan’s wake leads us to Barthes conclusion?

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.